Time,context,and sublimity in Shakespeare and Proust

Abstract

A Shakespearean slant to Marcel Proust's evocations of sublimity is the starting point for an exploration of similarities between both authors’ conceptions of time and sublimity. Shakespeare and Proust make sublimity available phenomenally through a combination of the morphologies of their works, the synchronisation of fictional and real contexts, and the playgoer's/reader's own imaginative participation in the co-production of the sublime. In that participation, fictional contexts and real, historical contexts intersect at the sublime événement/event, which, belonging properly to neither context, is in transcendence of both and produces an extra-chronological interval that undermines the conventional distinction between art and reality.